After the Island
by Eruaistainiel
Summary: Ralph's life as it is once he has left the island behind.


((I do not own any of the characters in the story))

I was running. My legs and my screaming chest implored me to stop, but I paid them no heed; I was like a beast, driven only by one thing: the need for survival. The woods flying past me were a cacophony of noise, of the inhuman ululations of the hunters on my trail and of the roaring that was the encroaching fire. Another noise joined the chorus as distantly I heard myself scream. The terror and exhaustion almost overwhelmed me as I crashed through the underbrush for I knew I could not win. Run. Escape. The pure instinct pulsed through me, urging me on when I knew I could go no farther.

Then suddenly I was falling. The blackness came and I welcomed it, falling with relief into the emptiness where there was no fire, no hunters, no beast…

My eyes flew open and I found myself looking into the concerned eyes of one of my nurses. She had a kind face and I asked her name. She said it, but I neither heard it nor cared. I hardly knew why I had asked her. Most likely out of some lasting tribute to the courtesies of civilization that I had long ago dismissed and scorned as a façade for what was hidden within.

Slowly I felt myself prying away from the talons of my nightmare, and the knowledge of where I was, trickled back slowly to me. I was in an asylum; I had forgotten its name too. I turned to the woman and asked her how long I had been here. Five years she said.

Five years then. Five years since they had supposedly taken me off the island.

I knew that I had never left.

Where the rest of my life, the years prior to and after the crash were a hazy blur of hardly recollected impressions, the few weeks I had spent on that island were vivid. For I returned there every day in my dreams, and in my thoughts. My time there rested like a monolith in my mind, leaving no room for the everyday trivialities of life or even memories of my identity.

Now that I was awake, my mind began to go through its regular routine of reliving every aspect of living on that island. And then my thoughts invariably went to Jack. My conflict with him was undoubtedly the largest; the turning point from which the chaos on the island had spun from. I was in no disillusion about why this conflict existed. It should have been entirely possible for us to share the same island. But our greatest pervading mistake was that we had not accounted for the one element that was going to throw all of our best intentions askew: our human nature. This force wedged apart an agreement that could have potentially worked and lead the both of us to actions that my soul cringes now even to think upon.

Simon.

The last good thing on that God-forsaken place, the only one who saw the truth, and we killed him: the last thing that Jack and I did of one accord. If only I had listened to Simon! If only I had turned to his enlightenment on the state of man instead of bowing to the other conflict I had faced on that island: my own evil. I scoff now at my attempts at the time to rid myself of responsibility for Simon's death, and dump it on Jack's head. I drove my stake in as well as anybody else. And I felt good about it. It was only later, once the haze of blood lust was faded that I realized what I had done and felt the desperate need to fault someone else for my actions.

And then there was Piggy. If not for him and Simon, two forces of love and reason combating my dark inner nature, I have no doubt I would have been at Jack's side, ruling with terror and ordering the deaths of those I once would have considered friends.

But though Jack took the head of the savages that committed such acts of atrocity, I had as much responsibility as he for the deaths of the two that saved my conscience.

I was no better than he, when I stood by while Piggy tried to show his enemies the truth of what they were doing through his words and through his reason. And then was knocked forty feet to his death.

I was no better than he, when I drove my stake into Simon's heart.

Jack's darkness was my darkness. Jack's evil was my evil. And if it haunts me now, I am the better for it: better to go on with my life aware of the enemy within than to go on in ignorance, an ignorance that proved devastating on that island where the feeble structures of society were washed away and all that was within was laid bare.

I sighed and faced the wall. Slowly, the whitewashed room began to fade and again I was running… running…


End file.
